County Commissioners to Hold Special Meeting on LCCC’s WyoTech Proposal

The Albany County Commissioners will be hosting a public special meeting tomorrow at 9:30 a.m. in the commissioner’s chambers to discuss the prospectus put forth by Laramie County Community College to assume the WyoTech operations.

LCCC announced last week that it is considering taking over WyoTech operations and said it would need support from the city and the county before being able to do so.

County Commissioner Heber Richardson said LCCC officials presented the prospectus to the commissioners during their meeting Tuesday morning. Richardson said the officials did not ask specifically for financial or fiscal support and the meeting tomorrow will be a discussion of how the commissioners could potentially support the prospectus.

“They haven’t asked us to do anything except support them, so we don’t know if that’s policy support or financial support,” Richardson said. “And that was a new ask, right there in the meeting. That’s why we are meeting on Friday because there is a short timeline, the legislative session is going to wrap up here pretty soon and LCCC needs the support of the City of Laramie and of Albany County to take to the legislature.”

Richardson said it is unlikely any major decisions will be made in the meeting on Friday, as the timeline is short and the information provided to the commissioners was not in depth.

“We probably won’t go way in depth talking about money and all the different ways that we would support them, because I don’t think we’re prepared to do that, we don’t have enough detail,” he said. “It’s really just to keep the tennis match going to make sure that we get started on the process so that we can do our part. We don’t know exactly what that is yet.”

Richardson said he was impressed by how much work LCCC had done in a short amount of time as far as putting the prospectus together. Richardson said through his experience, WyoTech graduates are in high demand in the job market and have nearly 100 percent placement rates. He said WyoTech is a valuable asset and to the local and state economy and he liked the aspect of LCCC’s plan that would focus on turning out educated technicians into the Wyoming job market.

“All the signs are there that it could and should be something that can be done, it really just comes down to money,” Richardson said.

In the prospectus, LCCC is requesting the 2018 Legislature appropriate $8,465,026 in one-time, exception budget funding to the Wyoming County Community College to support the college's assumption of WyoTech operations over the next four years. It also will require a stable stream of local funding and recommended Albany County and the City of Laramie provide biennial funding in the amount of at least $1,494,636 by no later than July 2, 2021.

Richardson said public comments will be accepted throughout the meeting.